Disrupting poverty: How Barefoot College is empowering women through peer-to-peer learning and technology

Spend time with Roy -- pass through an airport with him, say --
and you can understand how his patrician charisma makes him
something of an NGO rock star. "You're lucky to see him," says Yogi
Durlabhji, who describes himself as a "friend and squash victim" of
Roy's. "He shuttles between Bill Clinton and whoever else." The
"whoever else" could be the Dalai Lama -- who visited the Tilonia
campus in February -- or Jeff Skoll, the eBay founding president
who has donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to Barefoot
College, or George Soros, whom Roy buttonholed once at the Aspen
Institute in Colorado to tell him he was wasting his millions
donating to top-down solutions.

Operating at rarefied levels of governance and diplomacy is the
life that Roy was born into: he was educated at two of India's
elite educational establishments, the Doon school (alumni include
former prime minister Rajiv Gandhi, writer Vikram Seth and artist
Anish Kapoor) and the University of Delhi. "I received an education
that was very elitist, very snobbish, very exclusive," he says. In
1965, however, the then 20-year-old Roy visited Bihar, in
north-eastern India, where he witnessed famine first-hand. The
experience affected him deeply and, after graduating, he rejected a
career as a diplomat or doctor in favour of digging wells in
Rajasthan as an unskilled labourer. There he met a man who taught
him how to drill and use explosives to blast down into the bedrock
to find water. One day the man took him to a small village named
Tilonia.

Roy was shocked by the poverty he encountered there. The
villagers were equally surprised to see a man of such pedigree in
their midst. "They asked, 'Are you running from the police?' I
said, 'No,'" Roy says. "'And you haven't got a government job?' I
said, 'No.' 'And you have a degree?' I said, 'Yes.' 'So why are you
here? Is there something wrong with you that we don't know?'"

Suspicion arose because then, as now, educated Indians didn't
move to rural areas. "It's very sad what the formal education
system has done to people all over the world -- not just in India,
in Africa [too]," Roy says.

He stayed. Amid the poverty, he had found an old tuberculosis
hospital that had been built by the British: a series of one-storey
buildings with high ceilings and shaded verandas at the end of a
road just outside Tilonia. The buildings were owned by the
government and used as warehouses. Roy brought to bear the benefits
of his upbringing: he spoke to a friend who was now a senior
government figure in Delhi who agreed that Roy could rent the
warehouses -- but only for a year. Roy asked why he wasn't allowed
to take a longer lease.

The official replied that there was no point: Roy wouldn't stick
it out in the countryside. They agreed a fee of one rupee per year
and Roy registered The Social Work and Research Centre (SWRC) --
Barefoot College's original name -- as an NGO in February 1972.

"We're still to surrender it after 40 years," he says with a
smile.

Roy's vision was to educate the local people who would then be
able to use the skills and knowledge to raise themselves from
poverty. He hired what he describes as "paper-qualified urban
professionals" to come to Tilonia to do the teaching. But these
educators would spend only a few months at the project before
leaving for permanent positions in the cities. Roy realised he
needed to change his approach, and from 1977 onwards his strategy
shifted: he asked the local people who had learned skills to do the
teaching.

The college began by training men from the local village. But
those who gained the expertise didn't stick around -- they left for
the city in search of well-paid jobs. One of Roy's tenets for the
programme had been to discourage migration, but he discovered that
having skills had exactly the opposite effect on people. One day he
had a revelation: he was training the wrong gender.

"So we switched to women," Roy says. "We thought that they'd be
the best to train because they're not compulsively mobile."

Advocating for the poor at the state assembly meant Roy and
other Barefoot workers found themselves opposing local legislators
and landowners. In 1979, the project was plunged into crisis when a
worker whom Roy had dismissed for embezzlement was elected to local
government and made an attempt to have the lease on the warehouses
withdrawn. Roy received a letter telling him the campus must be
vacated by January 1980.

Then, in the autumn, Roy received another letter from, to his
surprise, Robert
McNamara, president of the World Bank. McNamara, who had served
as US secretary of defense under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson,
had made it his business to use his office to reduce poverty, and
wanted to visit Tilonia to see what Roy was doing. Soon afterwards,
McNamara arrived in India with George Bundy, who had been secretary
for national security under Kennedy and Johnson.

McNamara's visit softened the attitude of the local government
to the college, but Roy was sure of a reprieve only when, in
January 1980, the month the college was due to close, Indira Gandhi
was re-elected to power. The order to repossess the college
buildings was overturned.

The experience made Roy realise that, as long as he depended on
others, the project could be derailed. So he decided to build a
second "campus" on some land about a kilometre from the former
hospital. The initial design took shape in 1986 after funding had
been secured from the Indian government. Roy needed to find an architect to oversee the construction. He eventually settled on
a man named Bhanwar Jad, one of the villagers who had filled the
vacuum left by the departure of the urban professionals in the
70s.

One Wednesday morning in July 2010, Jad, 48, stands on a hill
above the Sambhar, India's largest saline lake, which is about
100km southwest of Jaipur. It's 45°C and children walk along the
road holding their school bags over their heads for shade. Jad is
surveying a Barefoot project, a recently constructed dam with a
capacity of 20 million litres that supplies fresh water to 15
villages below. Jad, who wears a gold hoop earring and has greying
black hair, smokes a cheroot while talking enthusiastically about
his role as an architect and engineer.

"I'm an illiterate farmer," he says, squinting in the midday
sun. "But I apply my mind. I think about gravity and pressure and
design, and I learn from everything I do."

The 2,800m2 campus was funded by the Indian government, the
United Nations Development Programme and other humanitarian
organisations and was completed in 1989 at a cost of $21,430. It
was designed to be completely solar electrified: there are five solar units, each producing
10kW, enough to power 30 computers, 500 lights, 100 fans, a fridge
freezer, a fax machine, telephones, the campus router and the
community router. The rooftops are used to harvest rainwater, which
is kept in underground storage tanks with a capacity of 500,000
litres. It is a model of self-sufficiency.

Comments

Incredible, moving story. Best of luck to Mr. Roy.

Smita

Sep 17th 2011

We should inject this type of selfless work as role model to our children instead of educating and preparing them to self centred life in walks of life... I would like to visit barefoot college thilonia and spread the messge to other back ward areasin south india..

N K Menon

Feb 4th 2012

Very inspiring. We are proud of such dedicated angels who are bringing wonderful change in lives of poor village folks not only in India but world over. I would aspire to visit, learn and become part of spreading message to may be some other part of the country.

P K Kaushal

Aug 16th 2012

Great work by Mr . Roy... i have hard him and he is very inspiring .. :)